String Quartet No.1 “The Kreutzer Sonata” (1923)

Adagio - con moto

Con moto

Con moto - vivace

Con moto - un poco più mosso

Janacek must have felt compassion for the woman murdered by her jealous husband in Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata even in 1908, when he was moved to write a piano trio on that subject. But that can have been nothing to what he felt in 1923, when he adopted the same theme as the dramatic basis of the first of his two surviving string quartets. By then of course he had met and fallen in love with Kamila Stöslová and adultery was on his mind (though not on hers). The trio is lost but the quartet remains one of the most vividly expressive works of its kind, inspired not by Tolstoy’s moral attitude to the situation but by the fascinating notion of a husband’s suspicions being aroused by the sight of his pianist wife making music - Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata in fact - with another man.

“How can one play this sonata and particularly that first Presto in a drawing room full of women in décolletage?” asks the husband in Tolstoy’s story. Janacek’s reply - “I had in mind the unhappy, tortured, beaten woman, beaten to death as Tolstoy describes her” - was his infinitely more inflammatory string quartet, the chamber-music equivalent of Kàtá Kabanová. Indeed, the opening theme, a passionate adagio sigh obviously associated with the unhappy wife, would not be out of place in that opera. It is immediately answered here by a mocking con moto variant on cello. The polarity is preserved throughout the movement, although a more lyrical variant of the main theme is introduced at an early stage to add another dimension to the situation.

The mocking theme assumes a rather more attractive shape in the second movement which, like that of Smetana’s Quartet in E minor, is a kind of polka. The fluttering phrases which greet the polka theme and, later, the entry of the sul ponticello viola - for Janacek a specifically erotic sound associated with the viola d’amore - create an atmosphere favourable to the scene which, with the introduction of an amorous new theme on first violin, inevitably follows. After a setback in the middle of the movement, where the polka material is recalled, the development of the amorous violin theme is resumed and carried to a climax over an urgent ostinato on second violin or viola.

The first theme of the third movement, introduced in canon by first violin and cello, is derived from the second subject of what Tolstoy described as the “terrifying” Presto in Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata - the terror clearly evident in the reaction of the second violin and viola. The vivace middle section is an extraordinary expression of anger, a turbulent texture of chromatic heterophony, fiercely plucked chords, and a cry of anguish derived from the violin and viola figuration. The Beethoven allusions return but only to be met with the same reaction in a different form.

The contrast between Janacek’s and Tolstoy’s attitudes to the situation is made quite clear in the opening section of the last movement, where the sighing main theme of the work (associated from the beginning with the unhappy woman) is treated with evident tenderness in muted harmonies on cello, viola and second violin. The unmuted first violin gives full voice to varying the same theme in an expressive solo line. The con moto section is based on one of these variants, projected first by viola against a second-violin ostinato, answered by first violin and cello, interrupted by a passionate protest from the whole quartet, and eventually driven to another violent confrontation, where the main theme is thrust down by a stabbing pizzicato version of the heterophony from the previous movement. It returns, however, carried on an accumulation of ostinato figuration to a feroce climax and, in the final bars, a quiet echo of its expiring phrase.